If the voice is the original instrument, as avant-garde composer Joan La Barbara once put it, then perhaps frogs are the original synthesizer. Is there another creature on the planet capable of generating more brain-scramblingly otherworldly sounds? Just consider the recordings that Dutch researcher Felix Hess made in Australia and Mexico in the 1980s: His subjects’ expansive array of growling, clicking, and zapping could give the fanciest modular setup a run for its money. Frogs feature prominently in the work of Uruguayan electronic musician Lechuga Zafiro, a.k.a. Pablo de Vargas: Six years after he released a song called “Sapo Diablo,” or “Devil Toad,” he delves deeper into amphibian imagery with his debut album, Desde Los Oídos de un Sapo (From the Ears of a Toad). The title isn’t merely metaphorical: The album’s spellbinding sound design was made in part using field recordings of toads—along with the sounds of birds, pigs, sea lions, water, metal, wood, rock, glass, and plastic.
De Vargas’ sound-gathering, carried out across South and Central America, China, and Portugal, yields a bracingly original palette with unusual heft. His drums frequently have the thwack of hollowed-out logs; in “Tero Sex (Danza Para Piedra Volcánica y Tero),” they suggest stones being struck, while slapback reverb creates the claustrophobic impression of being deep in a cave. Splashing liquid assumes rhythmic forms in “Agua de Vidrio,” recalling the water drumming of the Baka people of Cameroon and Gabon—combined, perhaps, with the clang of a blacksmith’s shop. But with rare exceptions, it’s never clear where any given sound may have come from, and de Vargas delights in using digital processes to smear and distort the sounds of nature into unrecognizable shapes. The end result feels a little bit like standing in a holodeck whose screen is falling in jagged shards.
It’s not just Lechuga Zafiro’s sounds that are original. Nothing here falls neatly under the umbrella of any established subgenre. Track after track—and sometimes measure by measure—he seems determined to rewrite the rules of club music. “Oreja Ácida” opens the album with lumbering stop-start triplet patterns, then explodes into hyperspeed drum breaks. “Botellharpa” stretches a pitch-bent sample of harp, or maybe guitar, over a quick-stepping, dembow-propelled 4/4 groove, using pockets of silence and queasy glissandi to wreak havoc on the rolling flow. Lechuga Zafiro’s percussive patterns would be plenty powerful even if programmed using conventional drum sounds, or simply banged out on sticks. But they’re all the more compelling for the way that unfamiliar timbres fuse with knotty rhythms. The movements of his beats feel dictated by the physical resistance of three-dimensional objects pushing through air; the peculiar microrhythms of his syncopations seem to stem directly from the contours of his samples.
“How could I call it my sound if I had not found it myself?” de Vargas asks, rhetorically, in a statement accompanying the record. For anyone depressed by the prospect of tomorrow’s streaming services filled with AI slop—or, indeed, by the frequency with which today’s electronic musicians default to generic sounds and tropes—Desde Los Oídos de un Sapo is a timely reminder that imagining a more dynamic musical future begins with learning to listen to the world around us.
